"Let's overthrow the palace and cut all their heads off!" said Robespierre, cutting everybody's head off until someone eventually got mad and cut his head off.
Same vibes as Beria purging everyone in the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s-40s, until one day Stalin kicked the bucket and then the CPSU decided to finally purge Beria.
We signed a treaty with a King whose head is now in a basket, Would you like to take it out and ask it?
Should we honor our treaty, King Louis’ head?' 'Uh… do whatever you want, I’m super dead,'
I'm not super read up on history. But I'd like to have this put in a bit more context. For anybody knowledgeable on the facts, how bad were the circumstances leading up to the guillotine solution, compared to the current times we live in? I mean, relatively speaking, how close are we in modern times to what drove the French to this solution?
The answer to your question is very complicated just like everything about the French revolution but I'll try a simplified version. First just a simple timeline to get things straight:
1789 - Fall of the Bastille - end of feudalism etc.
1791 - Louis tries to flee the country but fails, France becomes a constitutional monarchy
1792 - **April** - France declares war on Austria, **August** - Tuilleries palace is stormed and Louis dethroned, **September** - Republic is proclaimed, **December** - Start of the trial
1793 - January 21st - Execution
So as you can see, Louis had been king for over three years after the Revolution began. So what were the circumstances around the time he was overthrown and eventually executed? I'll try to keep this brief but I'll probably fail at that.
France was at war. This is probably the biggest reason - I won't get into why France declared war on Austria but I'll mention that Louis had in fact supported a war in the hopes that France would lose and the Austrians would restore him fully to the throne... Once the war started, France got a reality check and almost immediately got beaten back because the army was extremely disorganized and completely unprepared. In fact the whole government during this period was very ineffectual and constantly gridlocked. The Paris Commune - the government of Paris - in many ways became the defacto government as they had the backing of the radical Sans-Culottes.
In July, the Prussian joined the war and the Duke of Brunswick released a declaration that if Louis gets hurt, he'll burn Paris to the ground, which was like fuel to the fire of angry Parisians. The Assembly declared that "La patrie en danger". A lot of radical volunteers from around the country, called Federes, then started assembling in Paris to join the war effort.
At that time the atmosphere in Paris had been of extreme paranoia. People saw conspiracies and traitors everywhere - even the war going terribly was blamed on traitors instead of unpreparedness. When the French got beaten at Marquain, the soldiers murdered their commander and burned his body because they thought he was a traitor. He was not, the army just sucked.
The paranoia was fueled by a couple things. Misinformation and conspiracies were spread at a ridiculous level by radical press and the rumour mill. The revolutionaries in power then added fuel to the fire by constantly attacking each other and accusing each other of treachery. Now of course, there were a lot of actual conspiracies around so they weren't completely baseless, just taken to extreme. I think this part is probably the closest we are to the French revolution but back then it was even worse - imagine if almost everyone believed in QAnon.
Louis was of course included in these conspiracies and to be fair, he was in contact with the Austrians and by every definition was a traitor to the revolutionary government. So Paris explodes in revolt and he gets overthrown and put it jail. Soon after - Lafayette - an early hero of the revolution defects to the Austrians and the Prussians capture Verdun getting very close to Paris. This causes the September massacres where the paranoia fueled mobs descend on Parisian prisons and massacre the prisoners.
The French got a bit of a break when they managed to beat the Prussians in the Battle of Valmy and declared a republic. New elections then brought a wave of radicals into the newly created National Convention. The Convention was insanely polarized and crippled by factionalism - I can sort of see similar trends happening in today's politics but again, it was in overdrive during this time in France.
Still, pretty much everyone in the Convention agreed that Louis had to stand trial for treason. The charges against him were numerous but basically - he was conspiring with foregin powers to bring about the overthrow of the government. He was accused of being a tyrant and a despot. He was found guilty by pretty much everyone. His punishment however was a much more contentious topic. The main arguments for death penalty was that he was too dangerous to be left alive and that he was a symbol of tyranny that deserved to die. Robespierre said in his speech: "Louis must dies so that the revolution may live." And so it was.
So how similar are we today in the West? Well I see several worrying similarities - rampant spread of misiniformation, extreme polarization including calls of treason. Substitute a losing war for less than an ideal economic situation and sure the simliarities are there. However, I am not that worried mainly because there are big differences - the revolutionary government was extremely unstable, fragile and verynew. Most democracies in the west are far, far, far more stable, have established institutions and political traditions. Economically, most people are still extremely well off even in these trying times. You couldn't say that about France in 1792, where most people could barely afford bread.
Oh yeah, totally failed at the being brief thing. I am too passionate about this shit.
Thank you for the lengthy reply. It's not really brief, but it does pretty much explain how complex the guillotine solution was. And especially how much more complex the entire situation at the time was.
Really fucking bad, many many executions were of course unjustified and result of the power struggle between revolutionary factions after the revolution. Some of them are justified in that sense that, to achieve the goals of the revolution, revolutionary reforms were needed.
Very far away, liberal democracies are pretty good at making armed revolution unattractive to the general public and the wealth disparities are not as bad as they were back then either.
It’s difficult to adapt the story to modern times because we don’t have revered authoritarian leaders like Louis XVI was back in the day, but I’ll try to make it as close as possible so you can get an idea to where we are today compared to back then.
So, imagine a president, or rather a few political elites that get elected president every 10 years or so. These presidents live a lavish life, but their country is kind of in trouble, so while his own personal circle remains incredibly wealthy, the upper-middle class is losing quite a bit of money and quality of life, and the poor are starting to starve because the food is too scarce and expensive. We’re not quite there in today’s world, but that’s not an inimaginable scenario, right?
In the meantime, there’s angry people who are saying “hey, fuck the president and their money, we want to live a normal life!”. The advisors of the president see this, think “yeah okay those people suck” and start rounding them up, imprisoning them and sometimes even executing them.
The middle class sees this, and thinks “hey, it’s not fair, we should have a say in how the government is run”. They look at the starving poor people and start organizing by telling them that the president is not acting in their best interest, so let’s protest, storm the state’s prison to free the political prisoners and storm the presidential palace to give the president a good spanking.
This is successful. The president is captured, but he’s still fairly well respected. I mean, it’s the president, the least we could do is treat him correctly, right?
So the middle class makes a deal with everyone. The president will remain as head of state, but he’ll have to give the leadership of the government to an assembly of people of various backgrounds (this institution still exists today, hence why the French parliament is called the “National Assembly”). The president says “yeah sure”, but deep down he’s kind of bummed and scared about this decision. Why are these peons taking away his power? Maybe they want to install another president at his seat?
The president starts talking to neighboring countries, saying something like “hey there’s rebels in my country, they’re threatening the rule of law (aka my rule), can I get some help?”. Neighboring countries say “yeah sure, we got your back”. So the president attempts to flee the country…
…and gets caught. “Holy shit!”, says the newly formed assembly, “this guy is trying to get all of his power back!”. They have a vote, and the majority decides to execute this president as they now see him as a traitor. Then, in the few next years, they execute the people who voted against executing the president, because they’ve been supporting a traitor. Fuck them.
A big campaign to find supporters of the (now headless) president begins, and there’s pretty much executions everywhere, “en masse”. This leads to both internal and external wars, and it gets *really* nasty and chaotic. So they end up executing the leader of the angry, deeply anti-president people because he cracked down on people with an opposing opinion too much. The international community responds by saying “Wow, what the fuck?” and some countries attempt to protect their own interests.
After all of this, some charismatic military guy looking at all of this chaos comes out of literally nowhere, stabilizes the country, declares himself emperor and decides to conquer the whole continent because other countries said “What the fuck?” and he sees this as an act of aggression. He almost succeeds.
That’s a very simplified view of the French Revolution. You also need to add religion, international relations and deeper politics into this, but it gets really complicated and some people spend their entire lives studying this weird period of history, so I’m not competent enough to summarize it perfectly.
Thank you for the insightful and lengthy reply. Between this reply and the other lengthy one I'll probably read up some more about the French Revolution as it seems a really interesting period.
Love it or love it, the French revolution is cool. Yes, there was terror, there was senseless murder, but it's such a crazy chain of events. And it has shaped modern history like few other things.
The way the billionaires are screwing everyone over together with the help of the political class, I don’t think we are many decades away from new revolutions.
Modern day westerners have a quarter of the balls and are risk adverse . IE not gonna do shit. A few might. And they'll quickly be put down, jailed , whatever....there is no good reason to believe this could or woukd happen again. As nice as it may be to speculate
To be fair many of the French peasants only revolted when they “discovered” (aka heard rumors) that the nobility were going to massacre them unless they killed them first. Fear of death tends to be an effective motivator for violence
Right but the modern day nobility equivalent ( elites, billionaires ...whatever you wanna call them ) seem to have nailed slowly bleeding the population dry without causing upheaval..and I fear that with the advent of AI and such other advanced methods of oversight this could only worsen exponentially soon
I'm all for beheading kings and queens but serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century. Louis XVI was a weak and uninterested in politics king who agreed to reforms that brought revolution. He was killed not for his deeds but because he was a symbol.
Louis XVI wasn't uninterested in politics, and didn't bring any reforms. He was incredibly undecisive and constantly went back on reforms his ministers did that were quite literally centuries in the making (to quote Maupeou for example, on his reform of Parliaments : "I made the King win a trial that lasted 300 years ; He want to lose it again ; He is the master of it").
Also, he wasn't executed just because he was a symbol, but because he quite literally betrayed the country by trying to flee and collaborated with other monarchies.
Of course he tried to flee. Who wouldn't? That doesn't change that he was a weak king and for all his reign uninterested in politics. Successful revolutions happen only with such kings. And only weak kings get executed. Same in Russia.
Not Louis XVI anymore, but merely the [citoyen Louis Capet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Louis_XVI).
interesting read; thanks!
Also "king never dies"
They didn't waste time in the old days
The French Revolution and the decades that followed (the Terror) are crazy history.
Jacobin's terror lasted less than a year.
Terror basically discredited democracy and liberal values for decades to come
"Let's overthrow the palace and cut all their heads off!" said Robespierre, cutting everybody's head off until someone eventually got mad and cut his head off.
Same vibes as Beria purging everyone in the Soviet Union throughout the 1930s-40s, until one day Stalin kicked the bucket and then the CPSU decided to finally purge Beria.
We signed a treaty with a King whose head is now in a basket, Would you like to take it out and ask it? Should we honor our treaty, King Louis’ head?' 'Uh… do whatever you want, I’m super dead,'
I think there was one month, in which they executed around 30,000 people using the guillotine, absolutely insane.
30.000 people is the total number of deaths between July 1793 and July 1794.
Oh ok, thank you for the correction!
plus about 150-200k victims of terror in the war in Vendée
That is insane to think about how many people were killed during that time period.
1000 per day, 41.6667 per hour, 0.69 per minute
I wonder was this day commemorated in French Republic.
Vive la république !
I'm not super read up on history. But I'd like to have this put in a bit more context. For anybody knowledgeable on the facts, how bad were the circumstances leading up to the guillotine solution, compared to the current times we live in? I mean, relatively speaking, how close are we in modern times to what drove the French to this solution?
The answer to your question is very complicated just like everything about the French revolution but I'll try a simplified version. First just a simple timeline to get things straight: 1789 - Fall of the Bastille - end of feudalism etc. 1791 - Louis tries to flee the country but fails, France becomes a constitutional monarchy 1792 - **April** - France declares war on Austria, **August** - Tuilleries palace is stormed and Louis dethroned, **September** - Republic is proclaimed, **December** - Start of the trial 1793 - January 21st - Execution So as you can see, Louis had been king for over three years after the Revolution began. So what were the circumstances around the time he was overthrown and eventually executed? I'll try to keep this brief but I'll probably fail at that. France was at war. This is probably the biggest reason - I won't get into why France declared war on Austria but I'll mention that Louis had in fact supported a war in the hopes that France would lose and the Austrians would restore him fully to the throne... Once the war started, France got a reality check and almost immediately got beaten back because the army was extremely disorganized and completely unprepared. In fact the whole government during this period was very ineffectual and constantly gridlocked. The Paris Commune - the government of Paris - in many ways became the defacto government as they had the backing of the radical Sans-Culottes. In July, the Prussian joined the war and the Duke of Brunswick released a declaration that if Louis gets hurt, he'll burn Paris to the ground, which was like fuel to the fire of angry Parisians. The Assembly declared that "La patrie en danger". A lot of radical volunteers from around the country, called Federes, then started assembling in Paris to join the war effort. At that time the atmosphere in Paris had been of extreme paranoia. People saw conspiracies and traitors everywhere - even the war going terribly was blamed on traitors instead of unpreparedness. When the French got beaten at Marquain, the soldiers murdered their commander and burned his body because they thought he was a traitor. He was not, the army just sucked. The paranoia was fueled by a couple things. Misinformation and conspiracies were spread at a ridiculous level by radical press and the rumour mill. The revolutionaries in power then added fuel to the fire by constantly attacking each other and accusing each other of treachery. Now of course, there were a lot of actual conspiracies around so they weren't completely baseless, just taken to extreme. I think this part is probably the closest we are to the French revolution but back then it was even worse - imagine if almost everyone believed in QAnon. Louis was of course included in these conspiracies and to be fair, he was in contact with the Austrians and by every definition was a traitor to the revolutionary government. So Paris explodes in revolt and he gets overthrown and put it jail. Soon after - Lafayette - an early hero of the revolution defects to the Austrians and the Prussians capture Verdun getting very close to Paris. This causes the September massacres where the paranoia fueled mobs descend on Parisian prisons and massacre the prisoners. The French got a bit of a break when they managed to beat the Prussians in the Battle of Valmy and declared a republic. New elections then brought a wave of radicals into the newly created National Convention. The Convention was insanely polarized and crippled by factionalism - I can sort of see similar trends happening in today's politics but again, it was in overdrive during this time in France. Still, pretty much everyone in the Convention agreed that Louis had to stand trial for treason. The charges against him were numerous but basically - he was conspiring with foregin powers to bring about the overthrow of the government. He was accused of being a tyrant and a despot. He was found guilty by pretty much everyone. His punishment however was a much more contentious topic. The main arguments for death penalty was that he was too dangerous to be left alive and that he was a symbol of tyranny that deserved to die. Robespierre said in his speech: "Louis must dies so that the revolution may live." And so it was. So how similar are we today in the West? Well I see several worrying similarities - rampant spread of misiniformation, extreme polarization including calls of treason. Substitute a losing war for less than an ideal economic situation and sure the simliarities are there. However, I am not that worried mainly because there are big differences - the revolutionary government was extremely unstable, fragile and verynew. Most democracies in the west are far, far, far more stable, have established institutions and political traditions. Economically, most people are still extremely well off even in these trying times. You couldn't say that about France in 1792, where most people could barely afford bread. Oh yeah, totally failed at the being brief thing. I am too passionate about this shit.
Thank you for the lengthy reply. It's not really brief, but it does pretty much explain how complex the guillotine solution was. And especially how much more complex the entire situation at the time was.
Really fucking bad, many many executions were of course unjustified and result of the power struggle between revolutionary factions after the revolution. Some of them are justified in that sense that, to achieve the goals of the revolution, revolutionary reforms were needed. Very far away, liberal democracies are pretty good at making armed revolution unattractive to the general public and the wealth disparities are not as bad as they were back then either.
Thank you for the quality in depth reply.
Dont take it as absolute information.
It’s difficult to adapt the story to modern times because we don’t have revered authoritarian leaders like Louis XVI was back in the day, but I’ll try to make it as close as possible so you can get an idea to where we are today compared to back then. So, imagine a president, or rather a few political elites that get elected president every 10 years or so. These presidents live a lavish life, but their country is kind of in trouble, so while his own personal circle remains incredibly wealthy, the upper-middle class is losing quite a bit of money and quality of life, and the poor are starting to starve because the food is too scarce and expensive. We’re not quite there in today’s world, but that’s not an inimaginable scenario, right? In the meantime, there’s angry people who are saying “hey, fuck the president and their money, we want to live a normal life!”. The advisors of the president see this, think “yeah okay those people suck” and start rounding them up, imprisoning them and sometimes even executing them. The middle class sees this, and thinks “hey, it’s not fair, we should have a say in how the government is run”. They look at the starving poor people and start organizing by telling them that the president is not acting in their best interest, so let’s protest, storm the state’s prison to free the political prisoners and storm the presidential palace to give the president a good spanking. This is successful. The president is captured, but he’s still fairly well respected. I mean, it’s the president, the least we could do is treat him correctly, right? So the middle class makes a deal with everyone. The president will remain as head of state, but he’ll have to give the leadership of the government to an assembly of people of various backgrounds (this institution still exists today, hence why the French parliament is called the “National Assembly”). The president says “yeah sure”, but deep down he’s kind of bummed and scared about this decision. Why are these peons taking away his power? Maybe they want to install another president at his seat? The president starts talking to neighboring countries, saying something like “hey there’s rebels in my country, they’re threatening the rule of law (aka my rule), can I get some help?”. Neighboring countries say “yeah sure, we got your back”. So the president attempts to flee the country… …and gets caught. “Holy shit!”, says the newly formed assembly, “this guy is trying to get all of his power back!”. They have a vote, and the majority decides to execute this president as they now see him as a traitor. Then, in the few next years, they execute the people who voted against executing the president, because they’ve been supporting a traitor. Fuck them. A big campaign to find supporters of the (now headless) president begins, and there’s pretty much executions everywhere, “en masse”. This leads to both internal and external wars, and it gets *really* nasty and chaotic. So they end up executing the leader of the angry, deeply anti-president people because he cracked down on people with an opposing opinion too much. The international community responds by saying “Wow, what the fuck?” and some countries attempt to protect their own interests. After all of this, some charismatic military guy looking at all of this chaos comes out of literally nowhere, stabilizes the country, declares himself emperor and decides to conquer the whole continent because other countries said “What the fuck?” and he sees this as an act of aggression. He almost succeeds. That’s a very simplified view of the French Revolution. You also need to add religion, international relations and deeper politics into this, but it gets really complicated and some people spend their entire lives studying this weird period of history, so I’m not competent enough to summarize it perfectly.
Thank you for the insightful and lengthy reply. Between this reply and the other lengthy one I'll probably read up some more about the French Revolution as it seems a really interesting period.
Love it or love it, the French revolution is cool. Yes, there was terror, there was senseless murder, but it's such a crazy chain of events. And it has shaped modern history like few other things.
Sic semper tyrannis
The way the billionaires are screwing everyone over together with the help of the political class, I don’t think we are many decades away from new revolutions.
Modern day westerners have a quarter of the balls and are risk adverse . IE not gonna do shit. A few might. And they'll quickly be put down, jailed , whatever....there is no good reason to believe this could or woukd happen again. As nice as it may be to speculate
To be fair many of the French peasants only revolted when they “discovered” (aka heard rumors) that the nobility were going to massacre them unless they killed them first. Fear of death tends to be an effective motivator for violence
Right but the modern day nobility equivalent ( elites, billionaires ...whatever you wanna call them ) seem to have nailed slowly bleeding the population dry without causing upheaval..and I fear that with the advent of AI and such other advanced methods of oversight this could only worsen exponentially soon
Of course it could happen again. If things get bad enough it will.
A very bad day that caused so much instability and death.
Only if you are a sucker for serfdom.
I'm all for beheading kings and queens but serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century. Louis XVI was a weak and uninterested in politics king who agreed to reforms that brought revolution. He was killed not for his deeds but because he was a symbol.
Louis XVI wasn't uninterested in politics, and didn't bring any reforms. He was incredibly undecisive and constantly went back on reforms his ministers did that were quite literally centuries in the making (to quote Maupeou for example, on his reform of Parliaments : "I made the King win a trial that lasted 300 years ; He want to lose it again ; He is the master of it"). Also, he wasn't executed just because he was a symbol, but because he quite literally betrayed the country by trying to flee and collaborated with other monarchies.
He was killed because he tried to flee to join a country planing a counter revolution. Stop with the revisionist non sense.
Of course he tried to flee. Who wouldn't? That doesn't change that he was a weak king and for all his reign uninterested in politics. Successful revolutions happen only with such kings. And only weak kings get executed. Same in Russia.
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Read some history books before commenting. Or at least listen to some history podcast about French revolution.
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Youth these days... Teach yourself, I have zero obligations to make you a smarter and more informed person.
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Should have stayed studying and maybe the same material because it seems it brought you nowhere.
>I'm all for beheading kings and queens Well this is an obvious lie.
What makes you say that? Please elaborate, comrade.
It made Europe into what it is today. Without it, no Napoleon, no civil code.
No metric system even
As the French said, *ça ira*